or the chirping of some belated
insect. An infinite peace, a divine melancholy, a silent serenity
surrounded this dead woman, seemed to be breathed out from her and to
appease nature itself.

Then the judge, still kneeling, his head buried in the bed clothes, cried
in a voice altered by grief and deadened by the sheets and blankets:
"Mamma, mamma, mamma!" And his sister, frantically striking her forehead
against the woodwork, convulsed, twitching and trembling as in an
epileptic fit, moaned: "Jesus, Jesus, mamma, Jesus!" And both of them,
shaken by a storm of grief, gasped and choked.

The crisis slowly calmed down and they began to weep quietly, just as on
the sea when a calm follows a squall.

A rather long time passed and they arose and looked at their dead. And
the memories, those distant memories, yesterday so dear, to-day so
torturing, came to their minds with all the little forgotten details,
those little intimate familiar details which bring back to life the one
who has left. They recalled to each other circumstances, words, smiles,
intonations of the mother who was no longer to speak to them. They saw
her again happy and calm. They remembered things which she had said, and
a little motion of the hand, like beating time, which she often used when
emphasizing something important.

And they loved her as they never had loved her before. They measured the
depth of their grief, and thus they discovered how lonely they would find
themselves.

It was their prop, their guide, their whole youth, all the best part of
their lives which was disappearing. It was their bond with life, their
mother, their mamma, the connecting link with their forefathers which
they would thenceforth miss. They now became solitary, lonely beings;
they could no longer look back.

The nun said to her brother: "You remember how mamma used always to read
her old letters; they are all there in that drawer. Let us, in turn, read
them; let us live her whole life through tonight beside her! It would be
like a road to the cross, like making the acquaintance of her mother, of
our grandparents, whom we never knew, but whose letters are there and of
whom she so often spoke, do you remember?"

Out of the drawer they took about ten little packages of yellow paper,
tied with care and arranged one beside the other. They threw these relics
on the bed and chose one of them on which the word "Father" was written.
They opened and read it.

It was one of